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Competing Priorities: Staff Perspectives on Supporting Recovery

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Abstract

Recovery has come to mean living a life beyond mental illness, and recovery orientation is policy in many countries. The aims of this study were to investigate what staff say they do to support recovery and to identify what they perceive as barriers and facilitators associated with providing recovery-oriented support. Data collection included ten focus groups with multidisciplinary clinicians (n = 34) and team leaders (n = 31), and individual interviews with clinicians (n = 18), team leaders (n = 6) and senior managers (n = 8). The identified core category was Competing Priorities, with staff identifying conflicting system priorities that influence how recovery-oriented practice is implemented. Three sub-categories were: Health Process Priorities, Business Priorities, and Staff Role Perception. Efforts to transform services towards a recovery orientation require a whole-systems approach.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all staff who participated in this study and who generously gave their time and honest thoughts. We also acknowledge the support of the MHRN and MHRN Clinical Studies Officers team that helped to recruit participants. We are very grateful to the REFOCUS research team based at 2gether NHS Foundation Trust for recruiting and conducting individual staff interviews. This article presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under its Programme Grants for Applied Research (PGfAR) Programme (Grant Reference Number RP-PG-0707-10040), and in relation to the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. The project will be published in full in the NIHR PGfAR journal. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and the views and opinions expressed by interviewees are those of the interviewees, and do not necessarily reflect those of the NHS, the NIHR, MRC, CCF, NETSCC, the PGfAR programme or the Department of Health. Further information is available at www.researchintorecovery.com/refocus.

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Correspondence to Clair Le Boutillier.

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Le Boutillier, C., Slade, M., Lawrence, V. et al. Competing Priorities: Staff Perspectives on Supporting Recovery. Adm Policy Ment Health 42, 429–438 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-014-0585-x

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